Preproceedings 2006 - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Against cultural identity: a family resemblance perspective on
intercultural relations
Marina Sbisà, University of Trieste, Italy
1. Troubles with intercultural relations
In this paper, I would like to draw attention to how
Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance can contribute
to the discussion on the relations among cultures in the
contemporary, globalized world. As everyone knows,
relations among cultures are far from being smooth, rather,
they are causing various troubles both at the level of
individual life stories and at the social or political level.
These troubles include:
(1) Failures in intercultural communication. Intercultural
communication is getting more and more necessary
both among individuals in multi-cultural
environments and among states and other
institutions in the globalized world. But it is difficult:
risks of misunderstanding and failures to
acknowledge the other's point of view are always at
hand. A naive approach leads to despising alien
cultures or their members. A less naive one
wonders whether understanding the way of life,
values and preferences, habits and beliefs of an
alien culture is ever possible.
(2) Worries for the preservation of one's cultural identity
and of cultural differences. It is a fact that
globalization of economic exchanges as well as of
mass communications tends to blur cultural
differences and threatens to make them disappear.
This is worrying for all those who feel emotionally
attached to their own cultural identity and received
values. Minorities and non-western cultures often
appear to be more aggressive in defending their
specificity against globalization, which is felt as in
favour of majorities and of western cultures. On the
other hand, worries extend to the possible
weakening and disappearance of received western
values, due to relativism. These various worries
raise the level of people's anxiety for whatever are
their own cultural identities and, on a less naive
approach, for the preservation of differences among
cultural identities.
(3) Increase in conflictuality. Because of the defensive
attitudes provoked by the above-described worries,
conflictuality among cultures tends to increase.
Hybrid identities and changes in cultural identity are
stigmatized; allegedly "pure" cultural identities are
discursively constructed and advertised. When the
cultural identity of an alien group (as for example a
group of immigrants) is acknowledged, this often
happens at the price of a certain amount of
segregation.
It may seem that the source of all these problems is
incommensurability among cultures. If cultures are
incommensurable with one another, difficulties in
intercultural communication are easily explained. But
acknowledgement of incommensurability is of no help in
finding positive solutions either to communication problems
or to the other above-mentioned troubles. This awareness,
together with the fact that there is no final evidence for
incommensurability, has suggested to drop the belief in the
incommensurability among cultures. But this too is of no
help. Claims to understanding an alien culture from outside
and confrontation conducted as if communication
problems did not exist may make intercultural conflict more
symmetrical, but do not solve nor soften it and, rather, are
a further source of increase in conflictuality.
I would like to suggest that troubles with relations
among cultures do not come from incommensurability or
from belief in it, but have a different source: the belief that
there are such things as cultural identities. Wittgenstein's
notion of family resemblance can help us see that - in the
relevant, trouble-making sense at least - there are no
cultural identities. This does not amount to denying that
human individuals have personal identities to which
cultural features contribute. Personal identities exist and
have cultural components and full right to interpersonal or
social acknowledgement. So, the view I propose is not a
way to conceal from sight cultural differences, thus
fostering discrimination. Furthermore, it avoids those
threats to personal identities that may come from
conceiving of cultural identities in the received way, as
normative models (if not Procustean beds).
2. What is family resemblance?
In a bunch of famous passages in his Philosophical
Investigations (§§ 65-76), Wittgenstein has proposed to
view concepts (such as the concept of a game) not as
perfectly delimited by necessary and sufficient conditions,
but as grounded in chains of resemblances. To a concept
such as that of a game (but perhaps to any concept), there
does not correspond any perfectly delimited set of entities.
Nevertheless, predicate words may make sense and are
correctly applied to certain objects in case these objects
can reasonably be seen as entertaining family
resemblance relations with one another.
The introduction of the notion of family resemblance
in the Investigations is slightly misleading, because at first
sight it appears to contribute not so much to the discussion
on the nature of meaning, but on whether language has an
essence (§65; cp. §§99-108). Language has no essence,
Wittgenstein suggests (e.g. §65, §92, §108), because it is
a network of language games, and these, like what we
usually call "games", do not form a well-delimited set
characterized by at least one property shared by all its
members, but merely resemble each other, in different
ways under different respects, as members of a family do.
The philosophical potential of the idea of family
resemblance is not exhausted by this polemical use. There
is no essence of language, nor of a game, ultimately
because it is search for essence which is senseless; this is
so, because of how language works and what meanings or
concepts do not consist in. In the thematic progression of
the Investigations, I am inclined to see the family
resemblance sequence of paragraphs as continuing the
initial attack on meaning as denotation, by transferring it to
predicates: just as the meaning of a name is not the object
it denotes, the meaning of a predicate is not the set of
objects which the concept expressed by the predicate
applies to. This is so because the job of the predicate is
not that of expressing a concept in the received sense of
295